The Narrator and Labina

The Narrator and Labina are joined by an intimate but precarious bond: she gives an isolated child shelter and food, and refuses to let the village’s fear determine whether he deserves protection. Their relationship grows inside a community shaped by scarcity, occupation, and distrust. Labina’s care offers the narrator a rare sense of safety, but it cannot remove the danger surrounding either of them; when she dies, he must leave, carrying a keepsake tied to the household’s earlier loss.

Encounter and Conditions of Dependence

The narrator reaches Labina’s hut after crossing frozen ground and losing consciousness. When he wakes, she is watching over him. She checks the effects of the cold on his ears, hands, and feet, feeds him hot, thick borscht, and tells him her name. He feels safe and content with her, and says that he likes her. This is not simply a transfer into another household: after repeated exposure to instability, a particular person’s practical attention gives him a moment of belonging.

That dependence takes shape in a region with few reliable public supports. The villages are remote and have no schools or hospitals, little infrastructure, and a customary order in which the powerful and wealthy prevail over the poor. German occupation deepens the hardship: peasants must supply food both to regular troops and to Partisans, and refusal may bring punitive raids that leave villages in ruins. At the village where Labina lives, detachments of German soldiers arrive three times a year to collect provisions and materials for the army. Rumors that the narrator should be handed over to the Germans therefore arise in a setting where a household’s attempt to shelter an outsider could be treated as a danger to the community.

Care and Refusal to Abandon Him

Labina’s protection is expressed through recurring acts rather than promises. During the day she works as a domestic for wealthier peasants, particularly households with sick wives or many children. She often takes the narrator along so that he can get a decent meal. Her work connects his survival to her own labor and to the unequal local economy: a child without secure family protection eats because Labina brings him into the places where she earns her living.

Villagers say that the narrator should be delivered to the German soldiers. Labina answers with curses, insisting that everyone is equal before God and that she will not sell him for money. Her response directly opposes the village’s fear-driven calculation with a moral claim about the child’s right to protection. The labels she uses for him—Gypsy and Jewish foundling—do not establish his identity; they show how she addresses a child whom others regard as a threat or burden. In her household, those labels do not cancel the obligation to feed and shelter him.

The Household and Its Limits

The hut offers the narrator a place to sleep, but not a private or undisturbed refuge. Its enormous bed leaves room for him among sacks, rags, and sheepskins. Labina’s guests arrive in the evenings with food and vodka, and their singing and toasts often wake him. He pretends to sleep and watches quietly, wary of the possibility of a beating that Labina sometimes said he deserved, though halfheartedly. His watchfulness preserves the distinction between feeling safe with her and being wholly secure in the house.

The bond also belongs to a world where food, shelter, and useful objects depend on exchange. Lekh trades caged birds for essentials including dairy products, bread, sausage, and cloth; elsewhere, villagers compete over the discarded cans needed to make portable fires. The narrator’s own comet, a small can stove that provides heat and a means of cooking, had been given to him by Olga the village witch. He carefully maintained it and treated it as a source of security. These details clarify what Labina’s household supplies: not an abstract promise of rescue, but food, a sleeping place, and temporary protection in a life otherwise organized around scarce necessities. Later, at the Red Army camp, peasants exchange produce for canned meat, shoes, or tent canvas, another instance of survival depending on what people can barter.

Accusations, Grief, and Mutual Reliance

The household’s instability becomes acute after Labina’s husband, Handsome Laba, dies. The thief who took his possessions is never identified, and the missing objects are never recovered. Rumors blame a cuckolded husband or fiancé, a jealous woman, or Labina herself. When accused, she reacts with fury, tries to confront those making the charge, and has to be separated from them by onlookers. She then returns home, drinks heavily, and holds the narrator close while weeping. At this point the relationship is not only one of adult protection and child dependence: in the aftermath of public suspicion, Labina also seeks physical comfort in the child’s company.

The narrator’s presence does not resolve the accusations or restore what was lost. Instead, their shared refuge becomes a place where the consequences of those rumors are lived through: Labina returns distressed, and he remains beside her. His earlier caution in the hut and her later closeness coexist, making the bond tender without making it uncomplicated. The account gives no indication that the narrator can intervene in the village’s disputes; his role is to witness Labina’s distress and receive the affection she gives him.

Death and Departure

During one of the fights over the accusations, Labina dies. When the narrator sees men carrying her body back to the hut, he understands that he must flee. He fills his comet with embers and takes a valuable necktie that Labina had hidden beneath the bed. The tie is the one on which Handsome Laba hanged himself. The narrator knows the local belief that a suicide’s rope brings good luck and hopes he will never lose the necktie. Its significance is therefore both personal and practical: it links his departure to Labina’s household and to the loss that had preceded her death, while carrying a meaning supplied by village superstition.

The ending makes the limits of Labina’s protection plain. While she lives, she can feed the narrator, take him to work, and resist demands that he be surrendered; after her death, those protections disappear, and he leaves with only the portable fire and the hidden tie. Their relationship is brief in the larger course of his wandering, but it is marked by concrete care, a moral refusal to abandon him, and the child’s continued attachment to an object from her home.